Wasn't there a big scandal some years ago about the big tech players making deals under the table about wages and not poaching each other's talent? At some point, when there is too much to lose, big companies are going to start collaborating on things that are not beneficial to the worker. At that point, you might say that you have total freedom in your choice of where to go to work, but you are also limited by the 'invisible hand of the market'
But yeah, I do agree that a direct comparison of programmers to serfs is a bit overboard. However, I am also seeing it in the sense that things don't really change much, even in a few centuries. The world is probably getting better for the people, but that doesn't mean that the same old tactics by the rich and powerful don't appear in new clothes.
Of course. I didn't mean to literally say that working as a programmer is like being a serf, just that the arguments for lopsided employment relationships are the same millenia old agreements that justified debt slavery and serfdom.
No, it's not. Serfs in a lot of Europe had the possibility to change their lords. Either by asking another lord to buy them, or by leaving to a city or to another lord's land without being taken back for a year, in the example of England.
The capital for a programmer's startup is not the laptop, its the intellectual property. That costs way more than a 1000$, typically the equivalent of at least a few tens of thousands of dollars in IP. But beyond that programmers are very far from the average.
The average person in the 2021 worldwide economy cannot live off social benefits on a whim.
The difference is in the degree of which one can switch. The vast majority of serfs, even if they might have been able to, did not switch out their lords. Programmers and really any white collar workers can do so readily and easily, every few years even.
Not really. To me it seems like you're latching onto a single not so relevant point of the difference. I could use the same argument for why serfdom is not at all equivalent to debt slavery because you can choose to grow the land however you like.
It's not true that all white collar workers can switch jobs every few years. Some white collar workers in the US can, and even then with asterisks (non-competes, wage fixing, etc...)
The biggest reason why serfs would stop moving is to have children and a wife.
In our economy, you can go work for anyone, or for yourself, or to some degree even not work at all and collect various social benefits.
Comparing programmers in 2021 to medieval serfs or ancient debt-slaves is literally absurd.
Programmers don't even really need any substantial capital to do their own thing. You can start a business with a laptop costing under $1,000.